Lizette Woodworth Reese
DAFFODILS
There flames the first gay daffodil
Where winter-long the snows have lain:
Who buried Love, all spent and still?
There flames the first gay daffodil.
Go, Love's alive on yonder hill,
And yours for asking, joy and pain,
There flames the first gay daffodil
Where winter-long the snows have lain!
Ruth Guthrie Harding
THE CROCUS FLAME
The Easter sunrise flung a bar of gold
O'er the awakening wold.
What was thine answer, O thou brooding earth,
What token of re-birth,
Of tender vernal mirth,
Thou the long-prisoned in the bonds of cold?
Under the kindling panoply which God
Spreads over tree and clod,
I looked far abroad.
Umber the sodden reaches seemed and seer
As when the dying year,
With rime-white sandals shod,
Faltered and fell upon its frozen bier.
Of some rathe quickening, some divine
Renascence not a sign!
And yet, and yet,
With touch of viol-chord, with mellow fret,
The lyric South amid the bough-tops stirred,
And one lone bird
An unexpected jet
Of song projected through the morning blue,
As though some wondrous hidden thing it knew.
And so I gathered heart, and cried again:
"O earth, make plain,
At this matutinal hour,
The triumph and the power
Of life eternal over death and pain,
Although it be but by some simple flower!"
And then, with sudden light,
Was dowered my veilèd sight,
And I beheld in a sequestered place
A slender crocus show its sun-bright face.
O miracle of Grace,
Earth's Easter answer came,
The revelation of transfiguring Might,
In that small crocus flame!